WhatIs

/grēn bu̇k/

n. 1. One of the three standard PostScript references: 'PostScript Language Program Design', bylined 'Adobe Systems' (Addison-Wesley, 1988; QA76.73.P67P66 ISBN; 0-201-14396-8); see also Red Book, Blue Book).

2. Informal name for one of the three standard references on SmallTalk: 'Smalltalk-80: Bits of History, Words of Advice', by Glenn Krasner (Addison-Wesley, 1983; QA76.8.S635S58; ISBN 0-201-11669-3) (this, too, is associated with blue and red books).

/grāt-wȯl/

[from SF fandom]

vi.,n. A mass expedition to an oriental restaurant, esp. one where food is served family-style and shared. There is a common heuristic about the amount of food to order, expressed as "Get N - 1 entrees"; the value of N, which is the number of people in the group, can be inferred from context (see N).

See oriental food, ravs, stir-fried random.

/grāt rünes/

n. Uppercase-only text or display messages. Some archaic operating systems still emit these.

See also runes, smash case, fold case.

/grāt rē-ˈnāmiŋ/

n. The flag day on which all of the non-local groups on the USENET had their names changed from the net.- format to the current multiple-hierarchies scheme.

/grā gü/

n. A hypothetical substance composed of sagans of sub-micron-sized self-replicating robots programmed to make copies of themselves out of whatever is available. The image that goes with the term is one of the entire biosphere of Earth being eventually converted to robot goo. This is the simplest of the nanotechnology disaster scenarios, easily refuted by arguments from energy requirements and elemental abundances.

Compare blue goo.

/grawlt/

n. Yet another meta-syntactic variable, invented by Mike Gallaher and propagated by the GOSMACS documentation.

See corge.

/graph-cue-el/

GraphQL is a query language and runtime that revolutionizes how applications request and receive data from servers. Unlike traditional REST APIs, where each endpoint returns a fixed set of data, GraphQL allows clients to specify precisely what data they need. This flexibility enables developers to gather multiple data pieces in a single request, minimizing the number of round trips to the server and optimizing performance.

/G-P-V/

n. Abbrev. for General Public Virus in widespread use.

/G-P-L/

n. Abbrev. for 'General Public License' in widespread use; see copyleft.

/gä-chə/

n. A misfeature of a system, especially a programming language or environment, that tends to breed bugs or mistakes because it behaves in an unexpected way.

For example, a classic gotcha in C is the fact that 'if (a=b) {code};' is syntactically valid and sometimes even correct. It puts the value of 'b' into 'a' and then executes 'code' if 'a' is non-zero.

What the programmer probably meant was 'if (a==b) {code};', which executes 'code' if 'a' and 'b' are equal.